How to type Question Mark
? is Shift + /, in the same place on US and UK keyboards. Alt + 63 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and ? writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+003F.
Question Mark
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+003F
- Windows
- Alt + 63
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 63 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | ? | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+003F | QUESTION MARK |
Other punctuation symbols
? lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What Question Mark is used for
In mathematical notation ? is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mathquestion$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about Question Mark
The code chart points from ? to Inverted Question Mark, greek question mark (U+037E), arabic question mark (U+061F), interrobang (U+203D), double question mark (U+2047) and black question mark ornament (U+2753). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Question Mark looks nearly right but not quite.
How Question Mark behaves in software
? takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Question Mark
What's the question mark emoji mean?
? is QUESTION MARK, encoded at U+003F. It is distinct from inverted question mark (U+00BF) and greek question mark (U+037E), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write Question Mark
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+003F |
| Decimal | 63 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 3F |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 3F |
| HTML entity | ? |
| HTML numeric | ? or ? |
| CSS | \003F |
| JavaScript | \u003F |
| Python | \u003F |
| URL-encoded | %3F |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\mathquestion$ |
| SVG | 003F.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ? needs escaping
? is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written ?, in a URL it is %3F, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why ? is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.